Sverre rows back home while Ingrid, her ears still ringing, wonders whether to strip off all her clothes and stand up in the boat in the middle of the gleaming sea, it is a sledgehammer of an idea, for, as she waves goodbye to the elderly couple for the last time, she realises that her Russian is also dead, Alexander, the young engineer from Leningrad, he has been killed, and she will never see him again.

One ewe is startled by her cry and is about to jump into the sea, but Ingrid grabs it by the forelock and holds its head in her arms and does not shrink from mumbling words she is ashamed of. Sverre turns a deaf ear and carries on rowing. Safely home, Ingrid wonders how she has been able to get through yet another day.

When the brothers return, she examines the catch, listens to Arne, who needs four new nets, tells them they should ask Barbro to get them ready, she has plenty of nets, and asks them to row to Stangholmen when they have finished gutting the fish, to fetch the plough that she and Sverre had no room for. After that she goes back to the house, and lies down, her ears still ringing, and dreams about things that are bearable, all manner of things, and about a perplexed smile on a face she thinks she recognises, but it is not always the same face, it fades and reappears, and her sleep is no longer a refuge.

Nevertheless, she doesn’t get up.

She wastes away in bed, unable to sleep, until one morning a figure she doesn’t recognise is sitting on the edge of her bed, it is Suzanne, and the sun’s rays on the window bars in the north-east are so golden it must be evening, unless it is the morning and she is at the wrong end of the house, she sits up and looks around.

~

Suzanne is young and strikingly beautiful, although it is hard to put your finger on what it is that constitutes her beauty, or say anything meaningful about why she catches the eye, she just always has done. Now she looks tired and worried, has unnatural hemp-coloured curls in her shiny hair, lipstick on her lips and on one of her front teeth, which is slightly protruding, and she is wearing a white dress with embroidered yellow flowers and small, green sprigs of conifer, Ingrid smiles at her.

“Is it tha?”

Yes, Suzanne has arrived. She says:

“Hitler’s dead.”

And there is another stranger in the room, a boy of seven, maybe eight, in a smart travelling outfit and polished shoes, like a confirmand, he has fair, nicely combed hair and the same worried expression as his mother. “This is Fredrik,” Suzanne says, Ingrid smiles at Fredrik and says:

“Hvur ar’ tha, my bitty man?”